Distributed routing for load balancing

Some open-loop and closed-loop control algorithms are discussed for an example of a discrete-event system, namely, the routing of arriving tasks from different arrival streams among several possible service stations. It is shown that it is possible to design open-loop policies that give good performance in a way which is very robust with respect to large changes in the arrival rates. This is possible even though it is assumed that there is no online coordination between the routing algorithms for the different arrival streams. Some further improvements of the performance are possible when a simple feedback policy, namely, overflow routing, is implemented. This also gives reasonable robustness of performance with respect to changes in the service rates